Edited by Robert U. Ayres and Leslie W. Ayres

Industrial ecology is coming of age and this superb book brings together leading scholars to present a state-of-the-art overviews of the subject.
Each part of the book comprehensively covers the following issues in a systematic style: the goals and achievements of industrial ecology and the history of the field; methodology, covering the main approaches to analysis and assessment; economics and industrial ecology; industrial ecology at the national/regional level; industrial ecology at the sectoral/materials level; and applications and policy implications.

Chapter 4: Industrial ecology and cleaner production

Handbook Chapter

Extract

Tim Jackson Clean (or cleaner) production is an approach to environmental management which aims to encourage new processes, products and services which are cleaner and more resourceeﬃcient. It emphasizes a preventive approach to environmental management taking into account impacts over the whole life cycle of products and services. There are clear conceptual resonances between industrial ecology and cleaner production. Both are motivated by concerns about the increasing environmental impacts of industrial economic systems. They emerged at more or less the same time (the late 1980s to mid-1990s) in the evolution of environmental management. Both have spawned their own journals and their own literature. A brief survey of this literature reveals strong intellectual overlaps between the two models. For example, the Journal of Cleaner Production (published by Elsevier Science) advertises its scope as including the following concepts: G G G G G G pollution prevention, source reduction, industrial ecology, life cycle assessment, waste minimization, sustainable development. Thus cleaner production claims to include industrial ecology within its remit, and has on one occasion devoted a special issue of the journal to industrial ecology (Ashford and Côté 1997). At the same time, the Journal of Industrial Ecology (published by The MIT Press) ‘focuses on the potential role of industry in reducing environmental burdens throughout the product life cycle from the extraction of raw materials, to the production of goods, to the use of those goods, to the management of the resulting wastes’. Without explicitly using the term, the journal’s list of...

You are not authenticated to view the full text of this chapter or article.

Elgaronline requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books or journals. Please login through your library system or with your personal username and password on the homepage.